Some books of poetry are so richly interconnected in their parts, in their web of images and associations and implications, that to begin a discussion anywhere is to begin everywhere. In “When My Mother Returns as X,” the final poem of Sarah Audsley’s debut collection Landlock X, the poet writes:
She multiplies herself to be every single
living thing: a cloud of butterflies, six calves
grazing in the field beyond the pines, grass
bending to the wind’s steady pressure. She’s
a swarm of bees seeking the dust of golden pollen
hidden in the cups of poppies.
The self that multiplies. The self that becomes. Audsley’s collection explores—in the most multifaceted, complex, open-hearted, and probing ways I can imagine—the poet’s identity and personal history, including her identity as a Korean American adoptee, as a rural New Englander, and as an artist. One of Audsley’s poems is entitled “While in Miryang, Searching,” and this act of searching, of questioning, is one that the collection pursues over and over. We see this in the magnificent variety of the book’s modes and forms—an interrogation of the pastoral tradition, and an exploration of the traditional Korean sijo (“What does this form do that others don’t?”). Key poems are ekphrastic (“Field Dress Portal”), still others incorporate collage and visual elements, including images from the poet’s own archive of adoption documents.
Each element in Audsley’s collection is deepened and complicated elsewhere. In conversation with the book’s ekphrastic poems and use of images, Audsley offers this commentary, in her poem “Initial Gestures”:
In the studio
the painter tells me
about the blank canvas:
one must begin
somehow just as
he assumes
a writer does.
But I could delete
that previous admission
if I wanted to.
A poet is like a painter. A poet is also, in critical ways, not like a painter. Not a contradiction, but a complication—a deepening.
This commitment to complexity is a central feature of Audsley’s work. I keep returning to a line that appears near the end of Audsley’s poem “Crown of Yellow”: “The channeling knife is the tool to carve a lemon twist. I use it.” I see the poet standing with her knife: cutting and turning, cutting and turning, until she has gone around the many sides of her subject, and released “the essence of the fruit.”
Such cutting and turning is vividly at play in Audsley’s use of color. Audsley is herself a painterly writer, conjuring bright images in poem after poem, many of which are animated by color. The book opens with color:
Yes, there is a field, in the middle, a tree sways
full with greenness, edible chartreuse.
Initially we see the field as a framed work, a composition with a center, and then we begin to feel it: wind through the leaves, maybe the sound of it, feel of the wind, the leaf color, a green so fresh you might sip from it. Color here becomes a tool for imagination and sensory experience.
As this opening poem, “In the X Pastoral,” continues, the social implications of color come to the fore:
…Inside the farmhouse, white
paint peeling, her grandma rolls out secrets
from the flour drawer, making biscuits, donuts, telling the little girl
she belongs, belongs, belongs in that field of hay & corn,
not in the field, far away, where women bend, pluck & place
their harvest in baskets.
The white farmhouse and its grandmother, the drawer of white flour which yields its secrets: all this sits adjacent to the yellow field of hay and corn. These are the colors of the rural New England landscape at certain seasons of the year; they are also among our racialized colors. Audsley brilliantly calls upon color—and yellow in particular—to play multiple roles in these poems, image-making and exploration of racial identity prime among them.
Nowhere is this more fully on display than in Audsley’s masterful poem “Crown of Yellow,” brilliantly placed as the second poem in the collection.
The colors of the fields flush with goldenrod.
Butter browned in a pan for the sauce to dress a dead fish.
Yellow yolks make cake, custards, or the exact shade for stasis.
Or shame. Yellow, I think, is always this way.
So many of Audsley’s powers are on display here. The play of sound: fields flush, butter browned, yellow yolks. Cake, stasis, shame. The multisensory images. The deft glide from the concrete into the abstract. The constant turning, the resultant surprise: a brown butter sauce dresses a dead fish. As the poem advances, it continues to turn:
The beehive above swings out; yellow bits flit here & there.
How yellow the yellow finches’ bodies, how they lift so easily into the air.
The in-between color—traffic lights say, Pause.
The striking of a single ray of sunlight can cause cancerous cells to grow, mutate.
Paint the kitchen walls a shade of yellow—warms & comforts.
Color of the piss puddle I left on the hardwood floor.
Using delicate shifts in syntax and sentence length, Audsley builds her list, presenting yellow in its many sides, in its positive and negative attributes: yellow is beauty, threat, flight, warmth, absence, sweetness, fear. In the second half of the poem, Audsley draws the racialized sides of yellow more explicitly into focus: “Never dress Asian babies in yellow, my mother instructs me. Clashes with their skin. / I learned from you, she says.” “About yellowface I cannot say enough. // What is enough?”
One of the beautiful consequences of this poem, and of its placement, is that it continues to breathe throughout the book—the poem “infuses the air,” just as the speaker does with her lemon and her channeling knife. Later in the collection, when we encounter a swarm of bees, or when we are confronted with goldenrod, or cakes, or shame—in each of these instances, these other associations return as echo—or, in the world of the visual, as flashes. Yellow flames.
**
In Audsley’s commitment to her own story and her poetic vision, she frequently gives voice to what is acutely painful. Her work isn’t afraid of the blade. In “Initial Gestures,” she writes: “I could say / my initial gesture / in this world was / ending / my mother’s life; / her death / so I could live.” I felt gutted many times by this collection, beginning on the very first page, thanks to a haunting line break (I’m returning to “In the X Pastoral,” quoted above, which I’ll repeat here). We have the grandmother in the white farmhouse:
…telling the little girl
she belongs, belongs, belongs in that field of hay & corn,
not in the field, far away, where women bend, pluck & place
their harvest in baskets…
Here—not there. This poem invokes the shadow side of belonging, a side not always given voice. For often (maybe always?), in order to achieve a sense of belonging—particularly in a time or place when our belonging is challenged—we must disavow all claims to belonging elsewhere. Or, as in the case of this poem, we have those claims disavowed for us.
**
Further binding together the poems in the collection is an omnipresent awareness of the womb, both as origin and as peril. One of the quintessential Audsley words might be “burst”—for its vivid action, its mouthfeel, its implication—and the collection is woven through with images of swelling and bursting. In the broad context of the collection, individual images bloom and gain new significance—the illicit swallowing of watermelon seeds becomes a kind of pregnancy, and the ruptured body of a mouse with its “intestine peeping out” evokes birth, when what has been held inside is newly, nakedly revealed (“she’s not the one who glistens.”) In one poem, the speaker imagines swallowing “odd animal eggs”; in another, she imagines popping all the world’s beach balls; in a third, she swallows her own father. In the book’s final poem, the speaker’s mother is:
the bitter in my mouth I can’t dilute; she swells inside;
she’s the branch from which birds will never fly.
She swells inside: it’s a quietly ambiguous phrase that both captures the mother’s pregnancy and the way the mother—as presence, as absence—swells inside the child (in the heart, we imagine), in an aching and tender reversal. Elsewhere, Audsley writes: “there’s a whole country, / a landscape painting inside me.” Audsley is indeed a marvelous and capacious poet. I eagerly await what will come next.